A Clear Silence, Or, Turning Down The Volume on Facebook

I have decided to prune and downsize the presence of Facebook. These few days, I have been diminishing it by:

1. Unsubscribing to updates of “friends” whom I don’t have conversation with, with whom I have not said hello to in the last year or so. To clarify, I *do* see these people often, it’s just, we don’t chat.

There are people in my community I see weekly but don’t speak to. And there are people I don’t see much of but communicate with constantly. Even if it’s only in my head. I wonder if one is better than the other, sometimes. Only because I wish for the reverse sometimes.

But that would make life seem flat, if the only people you saw were the ones you had the best conversations with. I have had more memorable conversations with unseen friends than with some I regularly see face to face. Odd, isnt’t it? Then again, absence does make the heart grow fonder.

Back to the prune, I mean, pruning. I am keeping *all* my faraway friends, and editing only the list of those who live within 778 square km of me (yes, that’s roughly the size of the island of Singapore).

Because I don’t see the need to watch another video of, say, a Russian girl who was kidnapped by aliens, or the eight-year-old boy who sings better than Elvis, much less have it appear on my newsfeed. Newsfeed, that’s a good one. More like another kind of feed.

It’s obviously an arbitrary decision, who stays, who gets hidden, but everyone is still a friend, for I don’t think the word ‘unfriend’ actually exists except on Facebook, and it shouldn’t, even if Mark Zuckerberg or some clever geek in the Valley coined the term.

My Facebook, always trim, has, like me, become trimmer. Haha.

A time will come when the “newsfeed” gets less and less interesting (somehow my most interesting friends don’t post on Facebook. They just stalk. I think they are busy scaling mountains, working hard, and unlike me, living life in its fullest reality.) That’s when I see myself probably dropping off the network.

2. I’m sticking to Pinterest, the newest kid on the block, for a while. We’ll see where this takes me. Though I find it a pain to trawl through the web these days just to pin stuff.

3. I’ve learned to cherish the silence that being away from the chatter has earned me the last month. I like the idea of keeping my thoughts private more often than not. But I still will post the odd thing on stuff I find cute and funny, like beautiful clothes and things. That’s what the online network is for, the way I see it.